Angela Carella: Immigrant was faceless carver of Mount Rushmore

Published 1:00 am, Sunday, March 2, 2014

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One of Stamford's most famous residents was Gutzon Borglum, the renowned sculptor who created Mount Rushmore.

Virtually unknown is Luigi Del Bianco, an Italian immigrant and stone carver who trained with Borglum, lived with Borglum for a time in his North Stamford studio, and became Borglum's right-hand man on the mountain.

Borglum gave Del Bianco the job of carving expression into the faces of the Rushmore presidents -- Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt -- and chiseling life into their eyes.

Work on the monument, never completed, ended with the start of World War II, when Del Bianco returned to his home in Port Chester, N.Y., where he earned a living carving headstones.

For all that has been written about the colossal endeavor to sculpt faces in a granite mountain, little recognizes the seven years Del Bianco, the chief carver, spent on Mount Rushmore. Now, 45 years after his death, a book has been written about him.

"No one is trying to take anything from Gutzon Borglum -- he is Mount Rushmore," said Douglas Gladstone, author of "Carving a Niche for Himself: The Untold Story of Luigi Del Bianco and Mount Rushmore," due out in May.

"But it took Borglum and a cast of 400 to make the monument, and I think there is a lot of room to give credit to more people. There are a lot of stories to be told, and I thought this one was compelling. Luigi Del Bianco gave those faces their soul."

Gladstone learned of Del Bianco after hearing a National Public Radio interview with Del Bianco's daughter, Gloria Del Bianco, and grandson, Lou Del Bianco of Port Chester.

Lou Del Bianco was 6 when his grandfather died in 1969.

"I was his only grandson and his namesake, and he let me know we had a connection," Lou Del Bianco said. "He was very sick and had trouble talking, but he made a big deal out of me. He would say, `You are Luigi, I am Luigi.' "

It's his only memory. When he was 8, Lou found a yellowed pamphlet about Mount Rushmore in a drawer. He asked his mother about it.

"She told me my grandfather had carved Lincoln's eyes. She said he was the chief carver. I couldn't believe it."

As he got older, he read whatever he could about the monument carved into the Black Hills of South Dakota. But he never saw his grandfather's name.

"I found myself looking for him on that mountain," Lou Del Bianco said.

In 1988, he visited Mount Rushmore. His grandfather's name was included on a list of workers who helped create the monument, but that was it.

Mount Rushmore took 14 years -- it was stalled for half that time because funding kept running out -- and involved hundreds of workers. Gladstone writes that they included winchmen, who hoisted workers up and down on boson seats; pointers, who transferred the measurements on Borglum's models to the mountain faces; powder men, who blew away rock with dynamite; and drillers.

In 1994 a writer named Rex Alan Smith published what is considered the definitive book on the monument, "The Carving of Mount Rushmore," because it tells the whole story, including the tales of the miners in Keystone, S.D., who accepted the challenge.

"We could double our progress if we could have two like Bianco," Borglum wrote.

In 1936 Borglum wrote that Del Bianco "will have complete charge of the practical ways and means of dealing with the finesse of carving and instructing other carvers," and that Del Bianco "is the only intelligent, efficient stone carver on the work who understands the language of the sculptor."

Later that year Borglum wrote that the remaining two months of good weather were to be spent finishing "the face of Washington with all refinements of expression, this work being in the hands of (Borglum) and the one stone carver on the work, Bianco."

But Borglum's letters hint at problems. Soon after he brought Del Bianco to Keystone in 1933, Borglum wrote to Boland: "I was immediately notified that his presence here was objected to and that the Rapid City office did not want him. I ignored this and put him immediately in charge of the work ... he complained to me within a week of the treatment he was being accorded from the Rapid City office, including rudeness, insolence and petty dickering about wages."

At one point, after Del Bianco quit the job, Borglum became angry: --¦ there are no carvers on the mountain -- there never have been but one and he refused to return because of the chronic sabotage directed at him by influences in Rapid City and the Park Department. ... Work on all the heads has been automatically stopped where the carving of the features required intelligence not available in Rapid City or by local workmen."

Gladstone notes in his book that the Keystone miners were a rough, tough group who all knew each other, and Census figures show that at the time the number of Italian-Americans living in Pennington County, site of Keystone, was 13.

"I can't prove bigotry or bias, but it's likely he was, at least, seen as an outsider," Gladstone said. "A lot of the miners in Keystone may have resented that this immigrant from the East was coming in and bossing them around, and earning higher pay."

Luigi Del Bianco brought his wife, Nicoletta, and their three sons to live in Keystone but they stayed only a year. Lou Del Bianco remembers his uncles' stories about a one-room schoolhouse, riding horses and swimming naked in a creek. Their friends were not the children of the miners so much as the children of the Sioux tribe.

"My grandmother would make Sunday macaroni and bring some to the Sioux Indians," Del Bianco said. "She would go to the reservation there and teach the women how to make it. They would have Sunday macaroni together on the reservation."

The family has photos of Luigi with a Sioux chief. Through a Sioux ritual, Luigi and the chief became blood brothers.

It may be that the native Americans, outsiders in their own land, welcomed the Del Bianco family as fellow outsiders. Gladstone points out in his book that the Black Hills were sacred to the Sioux, and that carving faces on the mountain was like forcibly installing unwanted statues in a church. The further insult was that Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt all had a part in killing native Americans or stealing their lands.

"I think my family, for the time they were there, were more comfortable among native Americans," Lou Del Bianco said. "My grandfather wasn't wanted. He was harassed and not paid what he was supposed to be paid. I don't know details but most likely it had to do with prejudice against immigrants."

Luigi Del Bianco quit the project twice and returned both times at Borglum's request.

Gladstone said he asked the National Park Service why there is no information about the chief carver on Mount Rushmore and was told that it was a team effort, that the contributions of individual workers are not highlighted, and that Borglum brought many people, including other carvers, to South Dakota.

It could be that documentarians don't know about Del Bianco because miners and others they interviewed left him out of their accounts, Gladstone said.

And Luigi Del Bianco said little.

In 1966 he told the Herald Statesman newspaper, "I would do it again, even knowing all the hardships involved ... It was a great privilege granted me."

Eventually, he gave his life for it.

Luigi Del Bianco died in his mid-70s of accelerated silicosis, a result of prolonged exposure to silica dust, found in granite. After an autopsy, doctors were amazed that he had lived so long, Gloria Del Bianco told National Public Radio. The dust in his lungs was like rock.